GOD

GOD

Kol Nidrei

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

October 7^th, 2011

 

Some time ago I had decided to write this sermon about God. For many years I have "explored" God with my Confirmation and "Discovering Judaism" classes. In any expression, it is probably the first or second most frequently used word in our liturgy. And in our liturgy, God stands at the center. Contrary to our current environment that puts you and me, our wants, desires and creature comforts at the center of concern, Judaism teaches that we are not the center. God is. Perhaps this night focuses our attention to God as does no other moment. We realize our finiteness, our limitations, our errors. We stand before "something" greater than ourselves. The echoes of the Kol Nidrei chant summon up eternity. They invoke us to stand in God's presence.

 

In thinking about topics for my sermons, especially with the introduction of Machzor Lev Shalem next year, with these few opportunities remaining to me, I need to speak about God. In every language and in every name, God is most dear to me.

 

Let me begin with a story that Rabbi Harold Kushner records in the end of his book "Who Needs God."

 

"In his classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells of a village where people were afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind ofcontagious amnesia. Starting with the oldest inhabitants and working its way through the population, the plague causes people to forget the names of even the most common everyday objects. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by putting labels on everything. "This is a table," "This is a window," "This is a cow; it has to be milked every morning." And at the entrance to the town, on the main road, he puts up two large signs. One reads "The name of our village is Macondo," and the larger one reads "God exists"."

 

From the first time in my youth that I ever heard the word "God" I always accepted believing in "Him." I don't know why. I couldn't define God. I probably couldn't have explained 'why.' I didn't ask for proof. Nevertheless I believed, I accepted God as "real," that God exists. He wasn't real like the 'things' in my life, the things that I could see and touch, 'show and tell.' There was a different sense of real.                           How can I explain this?

 

God was real to me because he was real to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Isaiah from where my Bar Mitzvah haftorah came from. I received this as the belief of my people andaccepted it into my heart. I took my Hebrew School classes seriously. As I increased my reading of the Tanakh, God became more real. If Jewish history was the stage and the Hebrews, Israelites and Jews were the seen actors, then God was a participant too, just unseen. As a young person I didn't ask how did God speak and how did our ancestors hear Him. I acceptedthat there was some form of communication, in both directions, and that God was real. Otherwise, to me, the Jewish journey made no sense.  Abraham and Sarah could have stayed in

 

                                                                                                                                                        2.

 

Ur. There would be no Judaism, no Christianity and no Islam. Yet the history of being a Jew, the defining characteristic, the journey of the Jewish people, has been predicated on exactly and precisely one fundamentally accepted truth: God exists. God is real.

 

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is: Who wrote the Bible? There are many approaches to explain the Tanakh. The traditional classical Jewish answer, for the Torah section is: God. And even if modern scholarship can show me how the complicated text came to be, I still need to hear God's voice in, through, above and around its words.

 

What am I to do with the phrases: "And the Lord said"?  And: "The Lord commanded"? Is it only some inner conscience talking to myself? Is it only an imagination, even if vivid, of my own creation? Is it a crutch for human weakness? Is it all only a metaphor? Or are these words from the highest, invisible realm of reality? Are they eternal? In my teaching I use the metaphor of a seven-layer-cake to illustrate that truths can be co-existent and not necessarily contradictory. No matter what is said about the text of the Torah and Bible, at some level, at some layer of meaning, for me, there must be The external reality that stretches from the furthest beyond and reaches to the reality of the human here and now. There must be God.                                                                                                                                         

There are many sources that influence and exemplify my thinking. In the past year there was a particular presentation of the comic strip "The Family Circus" written by Bil Keane. In it, as one girl is holding a cell phone to her ear and obviously not getting an answer, the other is saying to the other: "I can talk to God wherever I am without a cell phone….and I never get a busy signal." [We could add: "And never have a 'dropped call'!] I saved it for this sermon. That is how I feel when I daven, when I take the siddur or the Machzor in hand. Instead of email and Gmail and tweets, I have an unlimited conversation and I predicate my entire experience on the faith that God hears me, that I have a companion, who doesn't have to say a thing. Praying, tefilah, is not a matter of my head as much as it is a matter of my heart. The girl in the comic intuitively understood the belief in the openness of God, the availability of God, and the nearness of God. Without needing a long excurses, in simplicity, the comic strip articulates the faith that all of us can call upon God simultaneously and He will be there for all of us at the same time. In this sublime innocence, is the faith of God's presence. I need that faith when I pray. I need it when I live. Don't we all? Rabbi Kushner pointed out in his book, with faith in God's existence, we are never alone in the unending universe.

 

In our Machzor, based on our extensive, classical literature, God is called by many names. The common convention is to use the pronoun "He" and masculine grammar, even as our faith declares that God is incorporeal, has no body, and thus defies the logic of language. Each term has connotations that weave a complex relationship. A selection includes:  Creator - Boray; Guardian – Shomer; King - Melech; Healer – HaRofeh; our Father - Avinu; Master – Adon; Savior – Moshiah; Judge – Shofet; Comforter – Menachem; the First – Rishon; and, the Holy One, Blessed be He – HaKadosh Baruch Hu. We invoke God to be present in our lives. We summon national memory and personal consciousness. Language presents a  true, not virtual, reality.

                                                                                                                                                         3.

 

Here is another way. The last segment of Art Linkletter's TV show "House Party" was called "Kids Say the Darndest Things." In that vein, fifth graders of a Religious School were asked by their teacher to look at TV commercials and see if they could use them in twenty ways to communicate ideas about God. The following selection was shared on the network of the Conservative Rabbinate by my colleague Rabbi Matthew Futterman.

 

God is like.      Bayer Aspirin.                         He works miracles.

God is like.      A Ford.                                     He's got a better idea.

God is like.      A Coke.                                    He's the real thing.

God is like.      Hallmark Cards.                      He cares enough to send His very best.

God is like.      Tide.                                        He gets the stains out others leave behind.

God is like.      General Electric.                     He brings good things to life.

God is like.      Wal-Mart.                               He has everything.

God is like.      Alka-Seltzer.                            Try Him, you'll like Him.

God is like.      Scotch Tape.                            You can't see Him, but you know He's there.

God is like.      Delta.                                      He's ready when you are.

God is like.      Allstate.                                   You're in good hands with Him.

God is like.      VO-5 Hairspray.                      He holds through all kinds of weather.

God is like.      Dial Soap.                                Aren't you glad you have Him? Don't you wish

                                                                        everybody did?

God is like.      The U.S. Post Office.               Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet nor ice will keep

                                                                        Him  from His appointed destination.

God is like.      Chevrolet.                               The heart beat of America.

God is like.      Maxwell House.                      Good to the very last drop.

God is like.      Bounty.                                    He is the quicker picker upper..Can handle the

                                                                        tough jobs..And He won't fall apart on you.

 

All these cute quips make manifest a faith in the transcendent yet immanent God. They don't deny the great theological questions of good and evil. They do affirm wonderful answers. They all reflect the faith that God exists; that He loves us; that we matter to Him; that He is responsible for human existence; that we are not alone. In a charming way, they reflect the Psalmist's eloquence "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." We can ask for nothing more.

 

When I was a child I tried to imagine God. I wanted to understand Him concretely. Once I was lying on the lawn and looked up to the clouds. Captivatingly they looked like human ribs and I imagined that I was inside God's chest cavity. That was cool! Since the clouds stretched to the horizon and I must have been a little speck, I was utterly impressed with God's grandeur, and yet completely overwhelmed with the thought that I could be near God. Later I was to learn that that experience reflected a Talmudic discussion about God:  "Rabbi Halafta wrote: We call God 'Makom,' – Place – but we do not know if God is the place of the world, or the world is the place of God." There is no final answer. Maybe we are just near to each other. Today I get the                                                                              

 

      4.

 

same feeling from pictures from the Hubble telescope and space probes. The vastness of existence is linked to the God of the Tanakh, to the God to whom I speak with Machzor in hand,

whose words I read when I open the Torah. This is the Psalmists faith, and mine, as he writes: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me."

 

I did not intend for this to be a theological treatise but rather to share with you my personal posture with God for your consideration. It is a simple faith. I know that there are questions for which in this life I will never have answers. I am okay with that. Not everything needs to be answered. Eternity can wait. These beliefs comfort me and sustain me. They echo through the millennium from prophets and sages. They enable me to accept the sorrows in life along with the joys, for as I turn to God, here in the Sanctuary, in my home or backyard, I feel God is near, my friend and comforter, encourager and supporter, and teacher. He does not stop bad things from happening, but gives me the strength and sustenance to face them. He reveals the magnificence of all creation and humbles me to be alive. I cannot "prove" God. I cannot go "puff" and make Him appear as a slight of hand or magic trick.  Sometimes I wish that I could.

 

And yet I am unshakably certain of Him and His love.  I could not live life without God. That faith informs my life, as an answer to Him for its gift. Believing in God evokes my response, through mitzvot, through tefilah - prayer, through righteous living. It guides me to seek the synagogue as a community of faith, who act in faith, who join souls together in faith to God.

 

In the naivety and innocence of the child-within-us-all, I hear the still small voice that Elijah heard in the pages of Talmud and Tanakh, siddur and Machzor, and in our voices raised in prayer.

 

So like in the story with which I opened this sermon, let me label things before I forget:

            This is a talit.

            This is a kippah.

            This is a Machzor.

            This is Temple Beth-El.

                                                            God exists.

 

G'mar Chatimah Tovah.

Shanah Tovah Tikatayvu V'Taychataymu.

 

 

 

 

 

The following was not included in the sermon delivered in synagogue on Kol Nidrei but attached to the electronic edition as a postscript.

There is a great website that I encourage you visit: www.theinterviewwithgod.com.

 

The Interview With God Poem

I dreamed I had an interview with God. 

"So you would like to interview me?" God asked.

"If you have the time" I said. 

God smiled. "My time is eternity."
"What questions do you have in mind for me?"

"What surprises you most about humankind?"

God answered...
"That they get bored with childhood,
they rush to grow up, and then 
long to be children again."

"That they lose their health to make money...
and then lose their money to restore their health."

"That by thinking anxiously about the future, 
they forget the present, 
such that they live in neither 
the present nor the future."

"That they live as if they will never die, 
and die as though they had never lived."

God's hand took mine
and we were silent for a while.

And then I asked...
"As a parent, what are some of life's lessons 
you want your children to learn?"

"To learn they cannot make anyone 
love them. All they can do 
is let themselves be loved."

"To learn that it is not good 
to compare themselves to others."

"To learn to forgive
by practicing forgiveness."

"To learn that it only takes a few seconds 
to open profound wounds in those they love, 
and it can take many years to heal them." 

"To learn that a rich person 
is not one who has the most,
but is one who needs the least."

"To learn that there are people 
who love them dearly, 
but simply have not yet learned 
how to express or show their feelings."

"To learn that two people can 
look at the same thing 
and see it differently."

"To learn that it is not enough that they 
forgive one another, but they must also forgive themselves."

"Thank you for your time," I said humbly. 

"Is there anything else 
you would like your children to know?"

God smiled and said, 
"Just know that I am here... always." 

-author unknown